YouTube tests removing viewer counts — here’s what we know

It’s already really difficult to engage with the content you want to see, but now they’re also taking away the only immediately noticeable metric of a successful video? Genuinely just why
- They removed the star system a long time ago. They removed the down votes again a few years back.
  They want their algorithm to be the only thing that decides whether you watch a video or not.
  
  That'll work excellent for all those people trying to find tutorial videos for 'XYZ' when you have no verification data to determine whether it's even a legit tutorial.
  
  To be fair, the star system was garbage. I agree with the rest though
- Too hard to manipulate the algorithm with ai spam, disguised ads and propaganda if users can see all the videos at the top of their recommended feed have 20 views.
  You must only view what the Corporation approves.
  
  Sir, please put this empty verification can into your anus. Video coming up right after!
- They want to decide what you like and don't like. You WILL watch what THEY show you.
- some internal metric and testing said this increases engagement by 2.1% so now we are stuck with it.
- To hope you find new content. YouTube had been putting random low watch count videos in my feed. I never click on them because of their low view count. The thumbsnails make them look like they're high quality videos. Without the view count I have no idea if they have 1,000 views or millions. They're hoping I will click on them, subscribe, and spend more time in the app.
- I'm curious how this will affect things like sub-a-thons where people stream for charity and so on.
- Personally I find the highest viewed videos on YT to be the absolute shittiest ones.
  
  Yeah, that’s kinda the problem too
- The data will have to be there for sorting reasons and such, so this is just an extra nod to using an app like Grayjay, which will almost assuredly still pull the data and display it for you to see.

YT Exec - /rips massive line of coke off Intern's ass/ - "Remove View Count"
YT Engineer - "But Sir, users will hate that. It will actively make the user experience worse"
YT Exec - "That's the goddamn point!"
- Intern - "You could at least give me reacharound while you're doing that"
- This is inane but damn if it didn’t give me a good laugh :D

sounds like another job for the return youtube dislikes guy

Seems like a sure way to lose my engagement. I don't understand what Google thinks they're getting out of this except for flooding you with more ads between video recommendations at the cost of people actually watching anything and using the damn website.
Between removing the dislike counter, a defect search bar that shoves garbage down your throat, recommendations of decreasing quality on my end and shorts (which I hesitantly gave a try but ultimately lost all interest in because it remained mostly low effort content despite my efforts to train my algorithm), this is just another reason why I find myself spending more time enjoying other things lately.
Maybe I am just out of touch, but I smell another bubble bursting when I look at how enshittified all major web services are simultaneously becoming.
- Maybe I am just out of touch, but I smell another bubble bursting when I look at how enshittified all major web services are simultaneously becoming.
  It feels like something has to give, right?
  We have YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, and more just racing to enshittify like I can't even believe, Google Search is racing to destroy the internet, yet they're also at the 'critical mass' of 'too big to fail' and shoved out all their major competitors already (other than Discord I guess).
- except for flooding you with more ads between video recommendations
  That's literally it. The advertising and marketing teams within Google have politically maneuvered themselves into running the show, and the software/product engineering teams that want to maximize the quality of the system they work on (search, youtube) are overridden by insipid metrics that advertising needs more user interaction with ads.
  They literally have been commanding that things be made more shitty to optimize their malformed metrics. You absolutely can get more people to click the sponsored search results... if you keep making them less distinct from the actual results. And advertising needs those good click through rates nooooow!
  There are email chains documenting this sort of shit going on that have become part of the public record due to various court cases.
  Wonderful article about it all here
  
  I think the second part of my sentence you cropped was the more important one to get across. It doesn't matter how indistinguishable ads become from regular content when nobody is even willing to use your billboard for an excuse of a website anymore. Besides, institutions like the EU and even the FTC in the US will step in and break apart those dark patterns when they keep getting out of hand. We already grand Google way too much leeway but there's only so much Silicon Valley giants can get away with before getting slapped with fines and bans. There are already strict rules in the EU about transparency when it comes to advertisements and not even Youtube can ignore them for a very long time.
- I guess I’d rather have it than not have it, but I don’t really understand how it would make YT unusable to me if I didn’t know how many other people viewed a video. How often are you using those numbers to make important decisions between videos about what to watch? I tend to go by the topic and subscribe to creators whose videos I like. Very occasionally I might be looking for a guide to an obscure level in an obscure game and there may be 3 similar looking videos about it, but one has 200 views and the others have single digits, and I agree in that situation it means something. But otherwise I just never pay attention to it. What do I care if 2000 or 200,000 people watched a video that looks interesting to me? Some creators I subscribe to have just a couple hundred followers. I don’t care.

In 5 years:
Youtube tests small ads in the top corner during video playback.
In 10 years:
Youtube tests small increase in size of well established corner ads.
In 15 years:
Youtube graciously allows video playback inbetween ads
- In 20 years, "YouTube was an online video sharing platform...."
  I doubt they can make it to the next 20 years, the way they are controlling everything.
- "We can sell 80 percent of the screen before inducing seizures!"
  
  86% if you disregard the mild ones!
- In 20 years:
  Users can no longer upload and YouTube becomes just a CDN for Adsense.
  (and the only way to watch old videos is through the Internet Archive)
- If you count the little banner text ads then they already have the ads in the top right corner of the videos and have had those for years.

Next What???? Removing Title, Only Thumbnail.
- It's currently a race-to-the-bottom in big IT & tech, where they don't look how they get you to like them but how much they can get away with, without repelling most of their userbase.
  
  In this case YouTube can do literally anything they want due to the lack of real alternatives. Hosting videos for free, for anyone (and any number of viewers) to watch, for free, is rather predictably not a very profitable business model. If you want to see what it takes to actually be profitable with such a model, look at the average free porn site. Extremely intrusive ads everywhere. If you don't want to pay, and ads are the only revenue, advertisers are the customer, not you.
- Gemini Ai makes up a title for you.
  That's as cursed as I can make it.
  
  The endgame will be Gemini generating videos based on the information they've harvested off you.
- The title will be text to speech on mouse over.
  The future is here.
- Removing the homepage entirely, replacing the entire UI with the shorts-style format of "view video right now, tap button to see next/previous video". If you want a specific video, you must search for it.
- Remove the user generated videos. Only title, videoads and comments allowed.

YouTube/Google and hiding data from the end-user, name a better duo.

Not to mention their “1080p” streams look worse than 2013 480p streams. The site is a dumpster fire.
- I thought I was imagining this until I put a 1080p episode on one monitor and a 1080p YT vid on another. The difference was night and day.
- That's why you need to pay for premium so you can get the 1080p premium bitrate.

Return youtube view counts, coming soon

this would essentially kill my method of viewing videos on the platform, this isn't a boost to interaction they think it will be, it will ultimately result in me watching less videos as I won't have the ability to decipher trash from good, so I'll just stick with content creators that I am used to and no longer branch out like I currently do.

Good thing we have Youtube alternatives. The two biggest ones are Odysee & Rumble. Also we have Peertube. The problem with Peertube is people don't use it. So it haves less content on it.
If you're going to watch Youtube, use a Frontend. For same reason Privacy Guides don't have Grayjay on it.
- Odyssey is all fascists and crypto bros
  
  Rumble isn't any better. It's where my dad gets his COVID conspiracy material after folks got kicked off other platforms.
  
  Isn't rumble the same? Lul what the fuck is going on with the world.
  
  You can find electroboom in Big Clive on there.
  Outside of that it's pretty much a write off
  
  Its got a lot of those types for sure, but it has the most normal content of any alt video platform.
  
  It's sad that Odysse has turned to that because it was where I was thinking about uploading content.
  
  That's what happens to all alternatives at the start, only really the content that isn't suitable for the main platform migrates there. It requires a mass exodus because of something major, like what happened with reddit 3rd party apps or twitter/X & the block change , to get enough regular users there.
  Lemmy literally exists because Dessalines, a "long time Marxist-leninist" decided that "Fuck the while supremacist Reddit admins" and made an alternative to host r/communism because reddit is run by an "anti-tankie scum".

Who makes these retarded decisions?
- MBAs

As someone who tries to regularly post videos on YouTube I think this would help me, since I'm sure many people (including me, unfortunately) avoid low view count videos.
But I can absolutely understand why you wouldn't want it hidden. I'm sure this will lead to major misinformation clickbaiting (as if that isn't already a problem!), but I believe that the view count will still be visible on the view page.
Is YouTube doing it with small creators actually in mind? Who knows, other than them?
Edit: I do want to clarify that I think hiding the date it was posted is just strange and would probably only lead to problems
- I don’t like this idea for the opposite reason. I'm one of the people who are suspicious of videos with millions of views since most of them look manufactured. We all use view counts to gauge if a video is something we’re after, probably in more ways than we can come up with.
  If it gives you any encouragement - I’m not discouraged by view counts. I know I like niche stuff and give small channels a try. It’s a chance at having more genuine interaction. As long as a video is not off-putting due to bad diction or very bad production then I’m not going to back out and see what it is about. This can work to your advantage too.
  
  That's fair, and I'm more inclined to believe people on Lemmy would agree with your view thankfully! A lot of high view videos are for sure manufactured, and from what I can tell usually target children.
  I guess we'll see how the landscape changes if this sticks around? We're all along for the ride, for the most part!
- Is YouTube doing it with small creators actually in mind? Who knows, other than them?
  I am pretty confident in guessing that they are not doing it for selfless reasons. Imo the reason is that the less information they give the user, the more you are beholden to the algorithm choosing for you.
  But depending how they hide it it actually might not just be users, but also companies that e.g. buy ads from them. The less information they get, the more they need to trust whatever metric google offers them
- That makes sense. Youtube has mixed more and more small channels with low views into my feed for a couple of months.
  
  I've watched a couple of those, they were really good.
- I don't avoid low view count videos because...say I get a notification that RedLetterMedia has just published a new Best of the Worst. It's been live for 4 minutes. Of course it's going to have a low view count.
  I'm looking for a repair video on the specific make and model of Dell laptop I have. I've seen exactly two of them in existence, not a popular model. It's going to have a low view count.
  I think it is useful information to have, it shouldn't be entirely hidden like the downvotes are, but I don't think it's necessary on the home page.
  Date uploaded though...that needs to be there.
  
  Yeah, I agree that it shouldn't be hidden entirely, and luckily as it stands now it's still visible on the view page if it's hidden on the home page

I don't understand why they on such a self destruct path?! I already barely use this fucking platform anymore because of how shitty it has become already, and now they want to bait me into watching some low views garbage on top of all that? WHY?!
- Because when you get pissed off at one shitty video and click off it to find a better one, that's free real estate in which to double your ads.
  And what are you gonna do? Go to Peertube? YouTube is too gigantic to have a real competitor no matter how much we try. It is a beast so massive and bloated at this point that we just can't kill it without legislative interference. And Google knows damn well that they're basically the only game in town so they aren't afraid of significant user backlash.
  
  There is a breaking point, eventually. YouTube's trajectory is gonna make next quarter's revenue great, but eventually something else will pick up user's attention instead.
- The money must grow.

Time for Peertube

Thanks Youtube, I hate it. Like I can see some arguments for taking away the view counter, even if I think it's a bad decision. But the date the video was uploaded? Who does that even help? I guess Youtubers will either need to start properly dating their videos or we'll just have to use context clues to figure out when a video was uploaded.
- But the date the video was uploaded? Who does that even help?
  There's gaming content that expires within a month, especially with frequent balance and other game changes, like with League of Legends. I won't watch a video that's weeks old because what's being featured probably doesn't work anymore after a patch.

Lmfao, fuck it, why not remove titles, tags and the searchbar too if you only want them to watch the videos your algo hand picks.
- Let's just remove all video metadata including author. You just get video that is unskippable and you have to watch it (and ads) before getting a new video. Webcam required to track your eyeballs and the video will only play while you are looking at the screen.
  
  And let's make the video be an ad too, why waste time.
- That's their end goal: no choice whatsoever, you watch 30 minutes of ads, followed by the 30 second video the algorithm wants you to watch (which is also an ad), 30 more minutes of ads, and so on.
  And, since they also own chrome, you can't go to any other page without first spending at least six hours watching youtube.

How about you test marking videos as watched across devices so I don’t have the same shit pushed back at me all the time.
- HOW ABOUT YOU STOP SHOWING ME ALREADY WATCHED VIDEOS IN GENERAL?! Why fill my home feed with shit I've seen already? I literally have to click (...), click (not interested), click (why?), click (I've already seen the video) FOR EVER SINGLE VIDEO I EVER WATCHED ON YT.
- Are you using a Pi Hole or any tool that blocks ads though the DNS?
  
  Interesting thought, might have to dig into that. Hadn't considered it messing with play history.
  
  I am using a pihole and I still have this problem. I'm logged in. I'm seeing videos I watched last week or two months ago. Or yesterday. They are being resuggested and do not show as watched if I go to that channel's page. It's infuriating.
- How about shutting your mouth and consuming what we show you. No one's asking if you've seen it already. Watch the ads!

Why? Is everything going to shit? Like counts, view counts, dislikes .. I suppose it won't change anything for me on reVanced, but still.. why?
- 💰📈
- Their ~~top minds~~ data scientists figured it’d be easier to manipulate users this way.

In the future you’ll pay $900/mo to stare at a blank page.
And you’ll have to because all the free sites are entirely ads.
- You joke but like, they are already pushing a twitch style sub model pretty hard already with the youtube "private sub" system that creators can do, it grants you access to videos that the creator marked as a subscription only, which is basically the same thing, as it shows you the video, and a tiny "sub only" label, and when you try to open it it brings you to the sub page.
  I forsee in the future youtube moving to a fully monetary model with only brand issued content being "free" and everything else requiring youtube premium
- "Fuck this. I can remove my eyeballs for free!"
  
  Just try it and see how your new cyborg hand DRM prevents unauthorized body modifications.
  Also, scientists are already at work finding ways to inject advertisements directly into your brain.
  
  This guys over here using his fingers to rip out his own eyeballs!!!

Ok, this one is really stupid. Dislikes? Ok. Views? Fuck all the way off, Google.

You know why they might be hiding upload dates? My theory is, Youtube doesn’t really want you looking at new stuff. (Very apparent by the algorithm) they want you looking at specific news stories, and specific content but not constantly seeking new uploads from independents.
But that is just a theory a plain theory. Thanks for watching.
- I hate how now when I watch a bunch of videos from a creator, my YouTube feed ends up only having that creators videos, like yeah I'm enjoying this person, but I do like to watch other things as well.
  It feels like I'm being forced into an echo chamber.
  
  The one that gets me is watching a new creator to me on a subject I'm interest in e.g. gaming and it turns out that said creator so has a right wing nut job catalogue and that's all that fella my feed for the next two weeks.
  My time is limited I just want to relax on my down time and ain't interested in rage bait but that's all yhe algorithm seems to want to show me every chance it gets by me clicking on a new name
  
  forced into an echo chamber.
  Yes, it does that.
  Using YouTube on a new account or through one of the alternatives will result in a wildly different feed. I was recently shocked by seeing the default non-curated feed on YouTube.
  Absolutely none of the content was interesting to me; most of it was directly anger inducing political crap or just plain brainrot. I would definitely not visit that shit page ever again if the default feed was my first impression. I don't know if it's supposed to be a right wing breeding ground by now, but it sure isn't as balanced as I would have expected.
  My regular YT feed is obviously much more interesting to me, and I can use it to find new content, but since I don't want to wait for the ads, I now only watch my own subscriptions on a different frontend, which of course will create an even smaller echo chamber.
  I get how a curated feed can benefit the user, but YouTube is just not making it possible. It will only show (rage) engaging content and without the dislike function, you can only decide not to watch the crap or get shown more crap until you do like it.
  
  I don't even look at the algo anymore, I just go out and search for content externally.
  
  I can't even use my home screen due to my Google account settings. What i'l do is do a search by date and subscribe to any good channels I like to ensure I get a curated feed for me on Youtube.

I've encountered so many AI generated videos that now I have to depend on view count since they removed dislike. And even view count doesn't work as well because people click on just to see why there are high view counts, turns out it's an AI video with high view count. Absolutely terrible practice. Youtube knows, they're not stopping
- YouTube har made everyone using AI in their video declare it, but in not sure it matters when it comes to being pushed out.
  Source: I was playing around with autogenerating YouTube shorts, YouTube did not make it easy
  
  Alright now how do I filter out that A.I content. Chances are if you search up a tech question, there's an A.I video made from scraping websites and bot TTS

And you (user) will accept all of it without questioning and maybe they let you watch some video between the ads.

Fucking YouTube is at it again, and you know what? I think Susan make a better YouTube CEO than the current retarded CEO, Luckily Revanced is a thing hopefully they patch it if it come true

Does TikTok show view count? This seems like a move that is intended to compete with TikTok.
- TikTok shows view, like and favourite/bookmark amounts.

I hope the return down vote people just start collecting view count and upvotes too. Then we can at least keep that.

Screw this, mainstream websites are constantly trying to do everything they can to influence public opinion every day. First dislike button second this.

Hmm at a glance I dont see a major issue here, my concern would be that I dont click on vids with shit numbers so they are now on a more equal footing.
But it is better for people not to be so focused on numbers like removing number of likes on Instagram.
- I don't know what's up with the algorithm pushing these lately. If it's a video with 4 views from a channel with no subscribers I'm probably not interested in it. Sometimes they have a good thumbnail/title so I give them a chance but 9/10 times it's terrible. Also often extremely right wing for whatever reason.
- But it is better for people not to be so focused on numbers like removing number of likes on Instagram.
  Is my mental health really something I want Google managing?
  
  They are not managing so much as they are eliminating a likely issue for users and the public.
- I don't mind seeing vids with small numbers (many are genuinely cool) but I avoid 500k and above (except music) because the mainstream is mostly clickbait.
- Wouldn’t the YouTube creator need to see views for ad revenue? Are they removing them for viewers or creators too?